


Sense

by Rynfinity



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3179867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rynfinity/pseuds/Rynfinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not that he goes through life blissfully (or otherwise) unaware of the physical universe his body inhabits.  Far from it; by all indications his senses are every bit as sharp as his brother's.  But Loki's richest, most rewarding world is by far the inner one, the one which exists between his ears.</p><p>~</p><p>In which a near-death state sets Loki back, literally.</p><p>~</p><p>Sloppy editing FTW; sorry, everyone!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sense

If one were to ask (yet none do, leaving him to assume the answer is either obvious or utterly uninteresting; he prefers the former but suspects the latter), Loki would confidently describe himself as a thinker.

Not that he goes through life blissfully (or otherwise) unaware of the physical universe his body inhabits. Far from it; by all indications his senses are every bit as sharp as his brother's. But Loki's richest, most rewarding world is by far the inner one, the one which exists between his ears.

Loki has rarely chosen willful asceticism, and he is very much capable of deriving pleasure from those things which reach him only through his senses. He relishes good food and drink - not to mention a lovely fuck - as much as the next person. He is ever quick to notice changes in his surroundings; as a creature of his circumstances, it would be terribly dangerous not to. Rather, it is more that he sees his physical body as a weakness. A liability. His senses distract him. They cloud the razor's edge sharpness of his reasoning mind.

On top of that, he's at least as likely to find the touch of hair or grass or clothing against his skin fiercely irritating as he is to deem it enjoyable.

All of which makes him - in this way, among so many others that collectively they border on incalculable - vastly different from his brother.

Thor is no fool, truly. That said, his first love (besides his hammer, and perhaps his brother, Loki might think when he is feeling particularly sentimental) is clearly the gifts - figurative, literal – brought to him courtesy of his own senses.

Watching him all these many years Loki has learned that Thor adores the feel of food in his mouth, clothing on his body, hands in his hair. The smell of hot dirt that rolls off the training ring early in a summer storm, the same oppressive stench that makes Loki’s mouth taste so strongly of soil and rot that it nearly leads to retching, leaves Thor grinning like the very same idiot he isn't.

Thor loves bright colors upon which to feast his eyes, strong scents in his nose and mouth, all name of sounds from wondrous melody to utter cacophony. He loves textures - flesh to feathers to silk to stone - beneath his fingers and mouths upon his skin. Whereas scent memory brings Loki wretchedness more often than anything close to pleasant, it treats Thor to no end of comfort.

Everything Loki finds revolting, in fact, his brother wants nothing more than to roll about in like one of Odin's hounds.

Besmudged, besmirched, besotted.

Beautiful.

Thor, that is; never Loki.

~

Thus, Loki is quite surprised to find the void's bone-deep, incessant nothingness (not soothing, as he'd expected, whenever he had envisioned himself freed from the noisy disruptions of his body and blessed instead with naught to do save think, but) wretched.

The absence of sensation - and it is _all_ gone, from the wind rushing across his skin to the visible spectrum to the sound of his own blood thumping in his ears - quickly becomes far more distracting that its presence had ever been. Robbed of the multisensory background _hum_ he had never even known existed, Loki finds himself unable to think coherently at all.

~

It is so unspeakably horrible that, initially, the pain - everything from the bone-shattering crash landing to the conscienceless tortures his captors employ - of the Chitauri stronghold (a small moon, it appears, but this place lies outside his sphere of knowledge; that, and he is not at his best besides) is almost pleasant by comparison.

Initially.

Almost.

After which point it becomes quickly far, far too much, until he must (and even in his present state the irony is not entirely lost upon him) dissociate in order to preserve his own sanity.

In this headspace he can think again, after a fashion, but it's no longer about reason. Instead it is all about _need_.

~

Need drives him to the Tesseract, to Midgard, and ultimately to the ugly mortal stronghold the humans call New York. Need hollows Loki out and leaves him starving for- for anything. For power, for freedom.

For death.

He simply cannot focus his thoughts effectively enough to be more precise. Loki carves a broad swath, driven ever forward by insatiable need. Towards what… away from what… he no longer knows.

~

It is once again need, long since transformed from the shriveled buds of hunger to the full bloom of bottomless wrath, that powers him straight into Asgard's royal dungeons. Loki no longer knows his father, his mother, his brother, himself.

Looking past need, he no longer feels anything save pain.

~

Death, when it comes, brings with it an overpowering surge of relief so great he can practically _taste_ it.

~

It’s an irony that should probably be lost on him, but isn’t. Because, as the dust settles around all he has left, Loki finds something odd to be the case: the mind can no longer deny the body what the body wants.

 _His_ body wants to live, so much so that it forces its decisions upon him; decisions from which his mind alone would have long since shied away. More need, more bodies (a mere few this time, at least by comparison) tumbling after those long since gone before. Act after act borne of desperation, borne of fear, borne of an aching, ripping loss so great his mind reels. Loki is no longer able to stand whole before it.

And then with everything and everyone gone – Frigga dead, they tell him, and though he saw it not he felt the loss of her seidr in his very bones; Odin taken to bed perhaps forever, Thor gone to Midgard with no plans to return – Loki can at long, long, _long_ last let his guard down enough to sleep.

~

When he wakes, the world is changed.

~

The light is wrong. Loki can sense it even through closed eyelids. It is too bright and too warm. That he notices it at all is odd enough; Loki doesn’t remember really caring about the light before, except as it helped him judge those things – the time of day, for example – he personally found to be of greater import.

Wrong, too, is the surface on which he lies. As he shifts, his body – which aches, as though he has not moved in so long his muscles have forgotten how – glides and shifts against what may be the wonderfully softest fabric his skin has ever known. Eyes still closed, he reaches out a hand to stroke his bedding; Loki’s fingers stutter over small wrinkles and folds. Tiny hills and valleys. It’s delicious.

“Madam Eir, come quickly,” someone whispers. “It appears he may be coming back to himself.”

Loki hears the soft scuff of leather against timeworn stone. It sends a shiver up his spine. He shudders, which pains him. And that, in turn, puzzles him.

“Prince Loki?” Eir’s voice is sweetly musical. Loki lies very, very still, in order to focus on the sound. As an added boon, doing so brings pleasant relief to his aching frame. “Loki, can you hear me,” she asks. Her tone is firm, though not loud. He is tempted not to respond, just for the joy of hearing her beautiful voice repeat itself again and again.

“Mm,” he hums, half without meaning to. Loki is no longer sure which rules him, his body or his mind. He can’t even bring himself to worry, though, not with the softness of the bedding and the comforting rise and fall of the chief healer’s voice.

“-if you can speak,” she is saying, and Loki realizes he’s let the tiny, repetitive motions – the slow sweep of his fingers across the sheets - distract him.

Talk. Eir has instructed him to talk. “Yes,” Loki asks, his voice a barely audible hiss. “I can indeed speak,” he insists, even though it is very nearly untrue. “Where am I?”

"In the palace, my prince," she tells him. Her voice is a symphony. "In the royal chambers, of course, of my healing rooms. No no, you must stay still," she insists, as he squints, blinking against even this dim light, and then tries - weakly, and with little enough ground gained - to sit up. Eir coaxes him gently back down to flat, her hands like small warmed stones upon his front "You have been gravely wounded, and it is essential that you rest."

Gravely wounded? Loki remembers no such thing. He does recall fighting with his brother, hurling insults like knives and splitting the air with furious curses. He remembers lying supine, helpless much like this and at the same time far less comfortable, upon the crystal bridge with the full weight of his brother's beloved war hammer pressing down upon his ribs. The two of them screamed, they fought bitterly, but grave wounds? It makes no sense. Try as he might, Loki has never been able to tempt Thor into not pulling even the smallest of punches.

"Was it an accident," he asks when wracking his brain gets him nowhere.

Eir frowns. She looks troubled in a way Loki cannot place. "Oh, I scarcely think so," she tells him. "Why, then, would you have gone to such pains to conceal it for so long?" She shakes her head sadly. "I know you were always stronger than you seemed, in some ways even more so than your brother, but I simply cannot fathom how you thought you could hide such a thing behind an elementary glamour and simply walk away."

Strong? Okay, maybe. But thing, and glamour? Loki is irrecoverably lost. He squeezes his eyes tightly closed again, as something - the light, he's sure; it must be that - is fast rendering them gritty and burning. "Forgive me," he says, "but I know not of what you speak. Where is Thor," he asks, abruptly conscious of his dry mouth and racing heart. Something is not right. "I wish to speak with him."

"Sir," Eir says, and now her there's a new note - a new instrument, even - in her voice. She sounds deeply, deeply troubled. "I think it best you sleep a while longer."

He is too puzzled to protest. When she props him gently up, he can only squint and blink anew. When in turn she sets the flange of a tiny vial to his lips, Loki can only sip and swallow. The draught she offers is rich for such a small thing, each drop thick on his tongue and redolent of herbs and spices he cannot quite place. It leaves him warm, boneless. He relaxes into his splendidly soft bedclothes, and-...

~

-Loki rubs his eyes, yawning. His throat is dry and rough. His lips stick together; his teeth feel as though they have sprouted a thin layer of velvet, or of fur.

This time when he props himself up on his own elbows no one hastens to put him to rights. He yawns again and lets his hands fold limp across his chest. He sees them, blinks fiercely, and sees them again.

Loki screams.

Doing so hurts both his lungs and his ears. His eyes water.

"Prince Loki," Eir breathes as she appears - flushed and panting - at his bedside. "I did not hear you wake. What is it?"

He sags back onto the mattress and holds first the offending extremity and then its compatriot out to (trembling) arm’s length. "What is this trickery," he rasps. "Why am I wearing another’s hands?" These fingers do resemble his in length and breadth, verily, but they are years older and a great deal more scarred and battered than his own will ever be.

When no answer is forthcoming, he tries a different approach. “Bring my brother here posthaste,” he demands, calling upon habit to ape a degree of authority he definitely isn’t feeling. “I will speak with him now.”

Eir sighs. She twists her hands together, and Loki feels the adrenaline race through his body like so much crushed glass. “Prince Thor is not here, Loki,” she tells him. “Do you not remember? He is gone to Midgard.”

Midgard. Thor has returned to the land of his own banishment, the realm where he served out his sentence and nearly paid (Loki) with his life.

“But _why_ ,” he asks, uncomfortably conscious of the way his jaw has been hanging slack. When Eir says nothing, Loki tries again. “If not Thor, then, my mother. I will speak with the queen instead.”

All the color drains – fast, leaving behind an unhealthy pallor – out of her wrinkled face. It is her turn to gape, though she recovers far more quickly than Loki had. “Oh, Loki,” she murmurs. “Do you remember none of it?”

He sits again, so abruptly this time that his head spins and his stomach lurches unpleasantly. “I remember fighting with my brother on the Bifrost,” he says. “We were very angry, both of us. It felt important at the time but, in hindsight,” he explains, trying to talk his way past his panic, “I suspect I let my jealousy – and Thor, his temper – get the best of me.” Loki frowns. “Does my father yet sleep?” The Allfather (not Loki’s blood father, no, but he knows he needs to spend considerably more time adjusting to that particular revelation before he has it even partially straight in his head) should have finished his long rest by now.

Once again, Eir does not answer.

Loki twists to look at her, wincing at the stretch in his back. Tears stream down her face. “My lad,” she says, in the exact tone of voice he remembers her using in their (his, Thor’s) youth… when one of them was hurt or gravely ill. “My poor lad.”

The look on her face both breaks his heart and terrifies him.

Something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Above all, Loki can sense it.


End file.
